Turpinu lasīt Viktoriju. Viņa ir daudz kreisāka par mani, taču nekādi nevaru noliegt, ka viņas ieskati saistībā ar pašreizējo situāciju feminisma politikā ir ļoti vērtīgi.



The idea that the child-addled and the menopausal do not think for themselves – and that therefore it’s just a case of who wins at capturing them, the goodies or the baddies – has repeatedly been proven wrong. In particular, it’s been proven wrong regarding discussions of sex and gender, which are not remotely new. If you allow women a template for political debate that centres their own life experiences, then it is entirely logical that many older women and mothers will focus on the salience of biological sex in relation to their own social and economic status. This is not because, as Baker patronisingly implies, they are lashing out due to ‘a sense of isolation that comes during a vulnerable time in their lives’ (that is, they’ve got this crazy, irrational idea that pregnancy and birth are significant in the social construction of female oppression due to their experience of pregnancy and birth being significant in the social construction of female oppression). Mumsnet ‘exclusion’ is not a bug but a feature of women organizing as a reproductive class. Those who attacked earlier gatherings of new mummies and older hags – the spinning circles, the birthing rooms, the washday gatherings – were responding to ‘exclusionary’ females, too; they just had a different language for it. You can, if you want, pitch current tensions as an old ‘behind the times’ generation of women failing to understand the importance of inclusion, but that is just another way of shaming the same class of people as before.

It is not weird for mothers and menopausal women who gather online or in real life to get rather angry about the suggestion that femaleness is not politically important, or that female people should not be permitted to organize around their own interests. On the contrary, it would be weird for them not to, which is why they keep doing it, century after century.

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Ageing while female is necessarily exclusionary because it involves the accumulation of experience after experience which male people do not share, and because it repurposes the state of ‘being ignored’ inflicted on older women into withdrawal by choice. You can attempt to barge your way into Hag Club, but you cannot take a woman’s life story and reframe it as yours, just as you cannot ensure that the women you boot out of the public sphere, having served their usefulness, won’t make spaces of their own that don’t include you.

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Over the past decade, the recasting of female sites of withdrawal and refuge as sites of privilege in which the dominant discourse is replicated has been aided by the concept of cis privilege. This allows, within the category ‘woman’, an analysis of the power male people hold over female people to be turned on its head (the privileged woman is she who has vagina, who must therefore cede space to others while remaining silent about the relationship between her sexed body and her own social status). This reassessment of those who must be included in women-only spaces has enabled those who simply do not want women to meet and share knowledge to reframe separatism (the act of the group without power denying access to the group with power) as segregation (in which the group with power excludes the group without it.)